We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous...

Crime has to be punished, but does punishment reduce crime? We conduct a neutrally framed laboratory experiment to test the deterrence hypothesis, namely that crime (weakly) decreases in deterrent incentives, that is, severity and probability of punishment. In our experiment, subjects can steal...

Crime has to be punished, but does punishment reduce crime? We conduct a neutrally framed laboratory experiment to test the deterrence hypothesis, namely that crime (weakly) decreases in deterrent incentives, that is, severity and probability of punishment. In our experiment, subjects can steal...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

In this paper, we show that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance relative to an unbiased opponent and even lead to an advantage in absolute terms.

We consider two-stage tournaments with different information structures: Either competitors observe each others’ first-stage effort before entering the second stage or not. In laboratory experiments, we observe that subjects adjust their effort to the effort information (if available): While...